


The Path of Least Resistance

by Triskaideka



Series: Side Quests [1]
Category: Warcraft - All Media Types, World of Warcraft
Genre: Gen, LLF Comment Project, Legion Era - Freeform, Religious struggles, long dark night of the soul, twist ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-09-26 00:06:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17131256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triskaideka/pseuds/Triskaideka
Summary: "Suffer well," they say. It's a burden.Or, what happens when you want out and higher powers choose to respond to that unvoiced wish.





	The Path of Least Resistance

“You want to…re-join the Scourge. Am I hearing you correctly, Commander?” Darion asked.

  
Cielle nodded.

  
“What kind of crack-brained insanity is this? Usually you never stop complaining about wanting never to go back!”

  
She tilted her head to say that he had a point. Then: “I think I could partially withstand his power and then we’d have an agent on the inside, spying on his troop movements and hearing his plans.”

  
“Commander, have you forgotten what happened to all of the spies the Alliance sent against the Cult of the Damned over the years? Do you honestly think Arthas wouldn’t strike you down and resurrect you again with a full complement of mind control spells in place?” Darion demanded.

  
“It’s possible,” she allowed, “but—”

  
“But nothing! I forbid it! If you aren’t here each morning for roll call, I’ll have a bounty put on your head and turn out the entirety of Acherus to hunt you down and slay you on sight!”

  
She stiffened. These weren’t idle threats. “I’m sorry you feel that way, sir, but you wouldn’t be able to stop me and all of Acherus is busy with other assignments as it is. I’m small fish,” she said.

  
“Small fish? Small fish?! Commander, you’re my lieutenant and you were privy to things that would bring the worst of the Scourge crashing down on us at the merest hint of information!”

  
“Sir, I…”

  
“You what, sister?”

  
“I’m tired of suffering,” she said miserably.

  
Darion turned his back on her. “If you’re so tired of suffering, then go downstairs and tell the quartermaster to harvest you for parts. Throw yourself off the balcony. But don’t you dare for a second entertain this sort of useless nihilism. If you go back to him, he wins,” he said. His words were uttered soberly but the intensity behind them…she was hurting him, just by considering it.

  
“Yes, sir,” she said. Somehow, the words that she resented saying burned in her mouth worse than all the others. He didn’t turn around for her to salute, so she left without permission. Maybe he thought she would take his words to heart instead of finding nothing but anger and ashes underneath. She took a skeletal gryphon from the flightmaster and rode it to Light’s Hope Chapel instead.

  
The Light always felt foreign to her. Sunwalkers and their sister priests were as new to the tauren and the Horde as they were to Cielle’s sensibilities, so she always assumed she could safely ignore its beckoning as irrelevant to her pre-Scourge history. It didn’t even attend Darion’s desires and he had served it faithfully, so why would it care about her?

  
A hand came to rest on her pauldron. Here it came: she was their antithesis so they would reject her and forcibly make her leave their sacred ground if she balked. “Your heart seems heavy, my child,” said a voice in Common.

  
Almost she began to laugh hysterically. They didn’t know about the heart yet. Instead Cielle shook her head. Explaining with words took too damned long.

  
“Shall I pray for you, or is that out of line? We don’t get many death knights in the chapel, for reasons I’m sure we both see as perfectly obvious,” the priest went on.

  
She shrugged one shoulder. The one that didn’t have a hand on it.

  
“Thank you, child. I shall pray that the Light eases your burdens.”

  
Nothing would ease her burdens more than if she ceased to be herself.

  
Fortunately, the priest chose to pray silently and she was not subjected to his choice of words. Should she pray as well?

  
_No_ , said a voice inside her. _No, she should not pray to an absent, uncaring philosophy._

  
But she knew that voice.

  
_Master_ , said another part of her. A vile, shrinking, cowardly part that she could neither slay nor remove.

  
_What do you wish, my faithful servant?_

  
No. No, he knew full well that she hadn’t wanted to leave his service originally, before the spells wore off when they were no longer strengthened by the web of magic that drove the Scourge to greater frenzies of violence. But ever since, she had fought hoof and horn against returning to him. Until just recently, when the burdens of remaining as she was became too great to bear.

  
_You know what I wish_ , she told him snidely.

  
Amusement traveled down the formerly dormant link. Behind it, she could feel the pent-up rage that, should she let it, would wash over her and wipe out everything she didn’t want to be. A conscience was a heavy burden, even covered over like a snowy cairn by unstoppable magics.

  
Cielle wasn’t sure whether she’d lied to Darion about her ability to withstand the Lich King’s magic; every death knight who successfully came through the training regimen proved themselves stubborn, resilient, and possessed of further useful traits like cunning. But she couldn’t remain as she was, not and retain what was left of her sanity. She more than half-suspected that the reason Darion could live with himself, so to speak, was due to his unending faith in the Light. Sure, it was buried under layers of sarcasm and slavish adherence to a militaresque routine, but she had inarguably seen a glimmer of regret in his eyes when the subject came up.

  
She had no such support structure to which she could return: a blank slate, if thoroughly enough cleaned, tells latecomers nothing of what was written there before. Not to mention the thoroughly uneasy response she elicited from other tauren that was itself a level over and above the unfriendly greeting that any undead, whether Forsaken or death knight, received from orcs. There was no one to bear her pain with her in the ways she wanted; fellowship among death knights usually meant cracking jokes arising from the blackest of black humor while any mention of true feelings was derided as weakness befitting the living. Not helpful in the least when Cielle felt low.

  
_The place you earned is waiting for you_ , whispered the voice of the Lich King, all honeyed promise.

  
_And all I have to do is betray everyone who trusts and respects me, right?_

  
_I think you’ll find that once you’re back in your proper place, you won’t wish to leave again. Your skills are without parallel and I will help you hone them to be even more formidable. Come back to the only place in the world that understands you._

  
Well, that was an out and out lie: the Ebon Blade understood her perfectly well. They just didn’t…meet her current emotional needs.

  
_I would say ‘no, thank you’ but you are undeserving of such courtesy_ , she told that terrible presence stiffly.

  
She knew she amused him, as if he played the part of a circling suitor and she put up the expected verbal defenses but in the end they both knew the inevitability of his triumph. And what of the future? Would Darion hold to his word and send cadres of death knights out to hunt her down and slay her? Or would he do the foolishly noble thing and try to save her from herself? Would his fondness for his lieutenant lead to more than just her downfall, in effect undoing the hard work and sacrifice made on their behalf by Tirion Fordring and the armies that he had amassed?

  
She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t be the cause of a domino effect cascading through the ranks, miring some to bring them down to her level and bring about the deaths of countless others.

  
But neither could she go on as she had, pretending that everything inside her head was, if not fine, then at least survivable. Every day enduring those parts of her that screamed for nothing less than death and destruction not of deserving targets like the Scourge, but herself.

  
There was no going back from a choice like this.

  
Probably the Lich King would make her go on a pilgrimage rather like his as a test of her faithfulness, wandering through nerubian tunnels weaponless and to come out on top of punching a Wild God in the face or something. He waited in the back of her mind, exuding patience, privy to her innermost thoughts because she had given him that inch of space to squeeze through and couldn’t bring herself to slam shut that window of opportunity.

  
The wheedling had stopped. After a point, it did grow useless to try to convince a death knight of anything counter to a held opinion but this was a new and unwelcome tactic.

  
_I will not be used against my comrades_ , Cielle told the Lich King furiously, knowing it was useless and he would use her however he saw fit; that he would take great delight in the irony of making her do the opposite of what she willed when her will was still her own. She expected him to continue with the buttering up process, telling her she would be lauded as a Scourge hero for all time, that her efforts would bring peace to innocents struggling with their inner demons as she was. And those sorts of thoughts were only her doing his work for him, making it easier to lie to herself and say that everything was for the sake of others. She knew well the futility of arguing with his foul logic.

  
The world had receded. That priest was talking to her but she couldn’t make out the words for the noise in her head.  
The Lich King didn’t needle her about her cowardice as Darion had. He knew her even better than her friends could, saw where she was deficient and would work to bring about solutions to those problems. He alone could strengthen her, uplift her, remake her and keep the screaming at bay.

  
_What do I do?_ she asked of anyone, anything that would listen.

  
Only one voice answered. _Say the words._

  
Words. What words could he want? Did it even matter, in the end?

  
_I am yours, my master_ , she said.

  
Ice filled her veins, filth galvanizing her. Her strength doubled, trebled. Other connections down the psychic line noticed her return and rejoiced, nameless nobodies barely clinging to consciousness and great entities whose names were known like curses among the living. Even a note of surprise from the likes of Orbaz Bloodbane at her return to the fold.

  
Purpose, too, filled her, quelling her doubts and arguments. The Lich King had extended his hand in good faith and she had fulfilled the bargain in coming back to him. All was forgiven. She would begin her work of seeing his will done at once, starting with these puling worms who thought the Light would save them.

  
She rose, pulling her runeblade free, and was met with the sweet sound of screams. The blade rose and fell, an extension of her will, chopping through flesh with ease—

  
Everything went black. Blinking, as easy as it should have been, was beyond her, and that wasn’t the half of it: her limbs wouldn’t obey her either. Immediately her mind went to one of the worst possibilities, screaming that she was captured and they were dissecting her while she was helpless.

  
Words swam in and out of focus, echoing and mixing so as to make comprehension impossible.

  
It was akin to being frozen in ice, she thought. All the while she never stopped trying to flex a finger, twitch a hoof, sweep her tail. Spells had weak points and, given enough time, she could find a clever way out of this and wreak havoc on whatever utter fools had thought to hold her against her will.

  
“I think she’s coming to,” said one voice, worried.

  
Damn straight she was coming to, and she was coming out fighting — just as soon as her arms started cooperating with her. She would crush the air from their lungs and shatter their ribs and—

  
“Cielle, can you hear me?”

  
They knew her name. That boded ill!

  
“We’re going to heal you up some more but you can’t start thrashing and take out the healer again, okay?”

  
What.

  
Warmth flooded through her and withdrew. Reality snapped back into place. Cielle opened her eyes to the team she’d been assigned to clean out this…this rats’ nest with. And she’d stepped in front of the squishier ones to take a spell.

  
“That must have been some nightmare,” commented the healer.  
Cielle could only nod weakly. This Emerald Nightmare business couldn’t be done with soon enough to suit her.

  
“Do you need another minute?” asked their guide.

  
Cielle shook her head. “My sword…”

  
“Get this woman her sword!” called the healer, and ragged cheers broke out from the others, huddled in a group with curious eyes upon her. Once it was in her hand, she raised it to the sky in defiance of bad dreams and those voices lurking in the back of her mind.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes you just gotta transmute those feelings into fic, amirite?
> 
> From NaNoWriMo 2018.
> 
> For more of Cielle's adventures, see [Gatekeeping](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9430070). Further adventures are forthcoming as well!
> 
> _Addendum, 6/2/19_ : This story is part of the LLF Comment Project, which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including:
> 
>   * Short comments
>   * Long comments
>   * Questions
>   * “<3” as extra kudos
>   * Reader-reader interaction
> 

> 
> This author replies to comments. Readers who would prefer not to receive a reply to comments, please state something like "no reply necessary" and I'll just stare with heart eyes at my inbox.


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